When you start a new podcast, you need to consider promotion and marketing from the very beginning. Chances areyou will not have the resources to engage in extensive and expensive marketing, but the internet has gone a long way to alleviating the need for this at the beginning.

Just think of what form online marketing actually takes. On the one hand, there are still extensively produced ads – the kind which you will often see interrupting your YouTube videos. But as well as these, you’ll also notice many more for smaller companies which are simply recorded in a person’s residence, or which feature a simple, inexpensive animation.

Consider then what type of videos typically go viral.It’s not the big expensive ads, but often smartphone videos shot in portrait orientation, and which cost precisely nothing to make. So, the online revolution has opened marketing up to many more people than it was available to before – and this is a real benefit if you’ve just started a podcast.

However, for new podcasts, the internet certainly hasn’t removed the need for hard work, and marketing that is smart and targets exactly the right people. There is a common tip for new podcasts that really underscores the work that need to be done.

This is that it is often advised that a new podcast prepares the first run of episodes before the first one even airs. The reason for this is that, after that first airing, the podcast creator will have a period to focus entirely on marketing without having to make more episodes.

This not only shows that podcast marketing takes time and effort, but also that new podcasts really need to engage in marketing right away if they are to be successful. There is a quite simple reason for this – at the start, you don’t have any listeners!

You also likely do not have a significant budget, and this is even more reason to be smart with your marketing at the outset. Luckily, there are plenty of tried-and-true strategies you can defer to. We will get into them in more detail below.

A Word About Ecommerce Podcasts

Podcasts hosted on ecommerce sites have something of a head start in this department. Visitors come to those sites for the product and, if the podcast topic is aligned with the interests of this customer base, these customers can very easily become listeners.

Plurawl, a company specializing in Hispanic T-shirts and other clothing items for the Latino community, also host on their site a podcast covering Latino issues. That means a listenership from day one, as people predisposed to find the podcast interesting are already visiting the site where it is hosted.

Strategies to Try

For early podcast marketing, here follows some cost-cutting yet effective strategies and tips:

Ask People to Subscribe

The personal touch is one of the great advantages of running a small business. Setting up an email list or actively asking out people who might be interested is good place to start.

Present Your Podcast Prominently

And this means wherever it is hosted, especially if that page hosts other things too. A big link featuring the brand right on the homepage is the way to go.

Share Reviews and Testimonials

And, if you can turn these into shareable videos, you have an amazingly effective form of marketing on your hands. Of course, you cannot do this right from the start, but you can source reviews easily after only one episode.

Beyond these specific tips, all that’s left to say is that marketing online is all about doing it right – not throwing money at the problem.